“Mommy, Mommy! What’s wrong?” she yelled. “Oh, no! What’s the matter?”
I couldn’t even get my breath to tell her. This place is bedlam, I wanted to say. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I wanted Lulu and my home and every other thing I’d lost. Even her, the girl I hadn’t done right by. I’d lost my mind. Life was just too much for me.
“My moods are swinging,” I said. “I’m going from hot to cold. I need a couple of my pills.”
She came over and rubbed my back until I quieted down. “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s almost lunchtime. How about I join you in the dining room? I can meet some of your friends.”
“I don’t have no friends,” I said. “I need some pills. Can you ask the doctor?”
Glenda sighed and said, “Let’s just try to get through lunch, okay? We’ll talk about that later. Come on, before the food’s all gone.”
I let her push me down there in a wheelchair but I made her stop before we turned the corner so I could get out and walk, otherwise tongues would wag. As it was, we caused quite a stir when we walked in. Heads spun like owls and a hiss rose up from all the whispering. Poison Ivy almost fell out of her chair when the helper came over to make room for Glenda. The meal was tuna casserole, carrot and raisin salad, and melba toast. Normal people get pudding cup for dessert. People like me get fruit cocktail.
Before long, Glenda was talking away, not just to our table but to everybody around us. She was like a movie star, old ladies getting up from their places to come over and ask who she was, rude as could be. Glenda kept smiling, glad-handing everyone and chatting up a storm. Carolyn talked just as natural as you please and Ivy kept interrupting, doing her darnedest to hog the limelight. Glenda even got a grunt out of old Krol.
I spotted Vitus across the room, talking to one of the girls who feeds the droolers. He was leaning against the wall like a playboy, his arms crossed over his chest, smiling and chatting. The girl nodded as she spooned goop into an old woman’s mouth. She threw her head back and laughed.
“You’re not eating, Mommy,” Glenda said. “Is something wrong with your food?”
I pushed it away. “Looks like cat sick. I’m not interested.”
Ivy watched the whole thing. She raised her painted-on eyebrows, twisted her chicken-ass mouth into a smirk, and said real low, so just I could hear, “I’ll be! I see Don Juan likes ‘em young!”
I grit my teeth so hard they almost cracked. Vitus waved goodbye to the girl and headed off toward one of the dark-haired boys who takes the dirty plates off the tables and puts them in a plastic tub. Vitus walked right up to this one and put his arm around his shoulder. They talked and laughed like old friends. Before Vitus walked away, he patted the boy on the back.
“See there, Ivy,” I said. “He’s just a friendly man, that’s all. He likes talking to people, no matter who they are.” I flopped back in my chair. I was wore out and I wanted to go back to my room, take a couple pills, and crawl into bed.
“Well, that was just delicious,” Glenda said in that cheerful way of hers. She looked at her watch, then at everyone around the table. “And I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, but I’d better get moving before rush hour starts. I have a long drive ahead of me.”
In the shuffle of chairs getting pushed out, old butts being hoisted from seats, and old legs trying to straighten out, I forgot about Vitus. When I looked up, damned if he wasn’t plowing his way through the tables, coming straight for me. My heart beat like a tom-tom. He didn’t look to the right or the left and he was moving fast, taking long strides. As he whizzed past us, something sailed over my head and landed on the table in front of me. I snatched it up and sneaked a look in my hand. It was a white paper napkin folded up into a pellet.
“Your friends are real nice,” Glenda said while she pushed me back to my room. “They’re a lively bunch.”
“They aren’t my friends.”
The pellet was burning a hole in my hand.
When we got back to my room, she gave me a bag of snacks—healthy things like yogurt, trail mix, and little boxes of raisins. “It’s going to be a couple of weeks before I can get down here again, Mommy,” she said, wringing her hands. “Is there anything else you need? Anything I can get for you?”
My sweaty hand was making the pellet soft and soggy. “I need some cigarettes,” I said, real pitiful. “Can you bring me a pack?”
Glenda’s eyes sparked. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“I’m out of cigarettes. I need some more.”
“You know you aren’t supposed to smoke!” She started packing her things up lickety-split, not even looking at me. “You have emphysema and high blood pressure! You just got over pneumonia not too long ago! It’s your choice if you want to kill yourself, but you’ll have to find a way to do it on your own.”
“All right then, I will. Maybe you better go now. I need a nap.”
I hated to part that way, but sometimes we just don’t see eye to eye. Soon as she was gone I opened the pellet. I don’t know how Vitus had managed to fold it so many times. It was practically the size of a handkerchief when I spread it out. He’d used a black felt pen, the kind with a real fine point. It bled out into the white tissue, making the writing look fuzzy, like it was alive and quivering. And oh my goodness—that beautiful handwriting. It’s the way they learn to write over there in Europe, full of curlicues and flourishes, like the Declaration of Independence, or a handwritten Bible.
I spread it out in my lap. It was short, only four words.
Shall we smoke tonight?
AN EVENING SMOKE
About nine o’clock I was in my room watching Roseanne. I looked up at the sliding glass door that opens out onto the courtyard, and there was Vitus standing there. I liked to jumped out of my skin. God knows how long he’d been watching me. He gave a little wave, made the smoking sign, then pointed at the latch. He had on a white V-neck sweater with blue and red stripes around the neck and wrists, them same sandals, and shorts! I’m telling you, his legs aren’t at all bad—shapely, with muscles like a horse, and just the right amount of hair, not too much and not too little.
When I opened the door, he bowed! He brought his hand from behind his back and held up a daisy, what I call a black-eyed Susan. Like I said, they got different manners over there in Europe. It’s what you call charm.
“Would you care to join me for a cigarette?” he said in that accent that calls to mind a fancy cologne. There I stood in my robe with my hair not fixed. I wasn’t sure about letting a man into my room, it being night and all. And I know they’d kill us if they caught us smoking in there. He must have guessed what I was thinking because he said, smooth as silk, “Shall we stroll in the garden?”
What with everything you hear on television, I don’t think I’ve stepped outside after dark for ten or fifteen years. But Vitus waved his arm toward the courtyard like a magician. All of a sudden it was like a movie where music starts playing, and birds commence to singing, and butterflies twit from flower to flower. I saw the stars and smelled the night-blooming jasmine. And I thought, Why the hell not? My life is lived. What difference does it make if I collapse right here and die?
“Oopsie!” Vitus said when I started to walk out. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” He put two fingers up to his lips again and gave me a sly look. He’s a right devil. All he had with him was a jacket. So I went and got the cigarettes and off we went, pretty as you please.
We sat on the bench by the little Cupid. He took the cigarettes out of my hand and offered me one, then lit it like a gentleman. I don’t want to say anything bad about Abel, but that man was rough. He had the manners of a mule. He’d just as soon piss in the shower, spit in the sink, or eat with his hands like a caveman. He was the hardest-working man alive, but when it came to couth he wasn’t far from the monkeys. Vitus and him are like night and day. He crossed his legs and sat so e
legant, with his foot bouncing in the air. Abel always splayed his knees five feet apart so his privates dangled right there for the world to see. Vitus held the cigarette at the very tips of his two fingers, while Abel pinched his between his thumb and first finger like it was a hangnail he was about to chaw off.
When I shivered, Vitus took his jacket and laid it over my shoulders. That smell! The man smell. Abel died going on seven years now, and I’d forgotten the way that scent can get in your nose and down the back of your throat real thick and fuzzy, like fur growing in your pipes. My legs went rubbery and my joints started buzzing.
“I feel a little woozy,” I told him.
“Woozy? What is woozy?” His laugh is way down in his throat. When I told him he chuckled. “Shall I call you that, then?”
I said I didn’t mind a bit.
We had us another cigarette, and chatted some more. I haven’t talked to anybody like that for the longest time. Just easy. Everything, don’t matter. You say what’s on your mind and he listens real close. Once in a while a janitor or an aide walked by and turned their heads in our direction. I got to wishing Ivy or one of her cronies would see us.
When we finished our cigarettes, Vitus slapped his hands down on his thighs. “Well, Woozy, I’m sorry to say I have to go. This evening has been delightful, but I must bid you a-doo.”
That’s how he talks.
I held his elbow as we walked to my room. At my door he held my fingers, just the tips, and gave his little bow.
It wasn’t ‘til I slid the door closed and locked it that I noticed the cigarette pack still in my hand. It was awful light. I flipped open the box. I was down to two.
MARCOS
Every other day between breakfast and lunch a man named Marcos comes and checks my blood pressure. He listens to my heart and lungs and takes my temperature. When he’s done with that, he gives me what I call my hookah—a pipe I smoke through a long tube. I have to suck real deep and hold it as long as I can. It’s for my lung disease. When I’m finished, he bends me over and bangs me all over my back, loosening things up. I hock up the biggest load of phlegm you ever saw, and I feel a hell of a lot better.
Marcos is a technician, not a male nurse. He wears those light blue pants and shirt, scrubs, like a lot of people here. He has a big belly and short bowlegs and a face only a mother could love, with big rubbery lips and bloodhound eyes, as sad as can be. Not at all a pretty man. Still, he struts around like a rooster. His hair’s done up fancy, Liberace-style, with so much gunk it glistens. And his jewelry! It’d weigh down a cart horse. Big square rings, three or four bracelets, enough gold necklaces to sink a battleship.
He is a Mexican and a fruitcake.
I’m not just saying that. He told me himself. It’s the damnedest thing. He looks real tough. Muscles like Popeye, jaw and forehead like one of them Neanderthals. Scarred-up skin, and a way of squinting that could curdle milk. But when he gets to talking, his hands get loose and start floating and fluttering around in the air. His eyes get to rolling and his eyelashes to batting. He fans the air and bites the heel of his hand and pats down his hair in a way that lets you know he’s the biggest pansy who ever walked the face of the earth.
The funniest part is I don’t even care.
Marcos has been good to me. The first few months I was here, I didn’t want to come out of my room or see anybody or even get out of bed. I could not get my mind around what happened to me. I took whatever pills I could get my hands on and half the time I didn’t know my own name. Then I got pneumonia. Good, I thought. I finally found a way to die. Every day Marcos came in and took my vitals. He straightened my blankets and opened the blinds. I just laid there and stared at the ceiling. He talked to me while he worked, nothing important, just chitchat. Sometimes he said things that made me laugh. Sometimes he told me tidbits about other people here, or about the doctors and nurses. “Miss Hildegard in 231,” he said, pinching his nose, “she don’t smell so good.” He imitated the doctor we called Dr. Kildare, who thought he was God’s gift. Marcos pranced in with one hand on his hip and the other flouncing in the air, then pretended he didn’t want to touch me while he took my blood pressure. He fluttered his eyes while he listened to my heart, and puckered up his face when he handed me my medicine. Bad as I felt, I had to chuckle.
After a couple of months when I didn’t get well he came into my room and sat on the edge of the bed. Right next to me! He crossed his arms over his chest and said, “All right. What is the problem?”
I told him about how they’d taken my house and my dog and stuck me here, locked me away, and forgot about me. I raved about this place that’s hardly better than a prison, except you got to break the law to end up in there and here your only crime is you lived too long, or fell and broke a hip, or left the burner on too long under a pan of soup. I blubbered about how I kept dreaming about my own sweet little house where I lived for forty-two years, and how I expect to wake up in my own bedroom, how I think I’ll hear the birds chirping and Mrs. Villagrosa next door calling her Chihuahua to come get his breakfast. I told him how the nightmare starts fresh every morning when I open my eyes and see the damn drab wall, the door to the bathroom, and the toilet sitting there cold and quiet as the electric chair. How it all comes back: them dragging me out of my house and locking me away. I didn’t hold back. I was bawling by the time I told him how I didn’t have a friend in the world or a reason to live, how I wanted to die, only my body was fighting me every step of the way. How the world was a dark place I wanted to leave. I screamed for him to give me something that would help me go.
He got up and pulled a chair over next to the bed. When I’d quieted down, he took out his wallet and showed me a little torn-up picture no bigger than your thumbnail. His mother. I didn’t want to say nothing, but she was the saddest thing you’ve ever seen. A thin, tired face with big black circles under her eyes, her hair pulled straight back, and sunk-in cheeks that made her look like she already had one foot in the grave. She didn’t even smile for the picture.
“She was an angel, my darling angel,” Marcos said. His eyes filled up. “Cancer, boom, when she was forty-nine.” He made a throat-slitting motion across his own neck. “Every morning, I light a candle and pray. I talk to her all the time. She is with me every moment.”
He stood up, put the picture in his wallet, and pushed the chair back over by the dresser. “So you see, it isn’t your time.” He wagged his finger at me. “When God is ready, He’ll let you know.”
He snapped on my TV and sat down at the foot of my bed. “Here,” he said. “We’ll watch a little.”
That’s when he started watching his soap operas in my room. Mexican soap operas, all in Spanish. I couldn’t understand a damn word they said, but oh my God, you’ve never seen so much screaming and bellowing and bawling in all your born days. Sometimes Marcos tells me what they’re saying, but most of the time his eyes are glued to the set. He gasps and chews his nails, pulls his own hair, yells in Spanish at the actors. Tears stream down his face. You’ve never seen anything like it. He is addicted to those shows. It’s more fun to watch him than the TV.
He could get in a lot of trouble for what he does. He could get fired. I’m not saying anything, though, because I don’t want him to stop. We talk and laugh about everything, and I mean everything. He don’t care what you say. Some of it would make your hair stand on end.
Once a week he brings a scale and weighs me. Today was that day. He set it down, got out his damn clipboard, and motioned for me to get up there. Like usual, I pissed and moaned and begged and pleaded. I can’t tell you how ashamed I am to step up there and see those numbers spin, dance around 300, and come to rest on that nasty spot.
“Just write down last week minus five,” I pleaded. “I feel like I’m getting up on the gallows.”
Marcos shook his head. “Señora, please.” He pointed at the scale. “Every week, the same thing. I am so tired of it. Try an
d behave like a lady.”
“You get up here!” I hollered. “It wouldn’t hurt you none!” Because if you want to know the truth, Marcos could stand to drop a few himself.
He didn’t say a word, just stared at me with those big, droopy eyes. I finally yelled, “Oh, what the hell!” and stepped up on the scale.
He took his time leaning over and looking at the number, then checking his clipboard, then looking at the scale again. Finally, he wrote something down. He waved me off the scale like he was directing traffic.
“Coralita, you have lost two pounds.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. At first I didn’t believe him, but when he showed me the chart and I got on the scale again to make sure, I started whooping. I would of jumped up and down if I could have. I was under three hundred! Oh, my God! I hadn’t even tried!
“I thought so,” Marcos said. He took a step back and looked me up and down. “When I came in I said to myself, ‘The señora is looking awfully sleek today.’”
He sucked in his cheeks and posed like a model.
Well, I don’t know what got into me. I was so happy and excited I asked Marcos straight out, “Listen here, can you buy me some cigarettes?”
Oh, what an act he put on! He must have learned it from his soap operas. He slapped his hands to his face and let out a gasp, then he stomped his foot and said, “Señora! That is against the rules!”
I just smiled. I knew he smoked because I smelled it on him. He smelled real good, like the cologne he used and his hair oil and his soap. But underneath it all I smelled tobacco. Every man I ever loved smoked cigarettes, so to me that smell is like nectar. While Marcos stood there puffing and blowing like a little bull, I said, nice and easy, “You ain’t fooling me. Watching Mexican TV in residents’ rooms is against the rules, too. But that don’t seem to stop you.” I gave him my best smile.
Breaking Out of Bedlam Page 4
